Some days ago I started to give up my VMWare Workstation Server (version: 6.5.1 build-126130) that is running on Debian Lenny.
The reason was it’s very difficult to upgrade (you see my installation is a little bit outdated:)) and maintain.

The first step is to migrate to VirtualBox running. And I wrote this little tutorial to migrate VMWare VMDK Image to VirtualBox.

I think I’ll persiver and get vmware to run under ubuntu 12 these instructions are crap for the following reason
I. when you open virtual media manager all buttons are greyed out except refresh. even if in preferences you have pointed it to you vmware folder/s
I wish people would test their instructions before posting them

Johnny, I have the same problem as you. Try this! Create a new machine in Virtualbox and instead of creating a new disk, say you have one and find the VMDK image file you want from your VMWare machine, it should use this and let you run it from there on Virtualbox.

Hopefully this has fixed it for you, if so please update this page. Cheers.